Share

Mark Gold, the brother of Jonathan Gold and president of Heal the Bay (and not the owner of Eva), takes us behind the scenes of how the critic's op-ed in favor of a shark fin ban came to be in a post on his blog, Spouting Off. We've long followed the interactions between these two loving brothers who have opposing jobs (one is saving sea creatures, one is eating them), and today Mark drops some gems about how the two interact.

Mark says he's been dying to write an op-ed similar to his brother's for a long time, but felt it would have more power coming from L.A.'s most honored food writer and Chinese food gourmand, rather than from another angry environmentalist. "The one person I know that could really make a difference in the fight to enact the shark fin ban is my brother, Jonathan," he writes, which kind of makes us go all "awwwwww" inside.

Then we get into the good stuff. Gold writes, "Unlike my brother, I’ve never consumed shark fin soup. In fact, I remember threatening his physical harm at a Monterey Park Cantonese seafood palace that actually had a cart featuring the item for $30 a bowl back in the1990s. Jonathan eagerly called the cart driver to our table just to get a rise out of me. He thought it was hilarious. I wasn’t laughing."

We like to publicly declare our own siblings to be great consumers of genitalia just for giggles and apparently we're not alone. Mark Gold gets his own revenge by writing,"Although, there are a lot of creatures (blue fin and live octopus) and body parts (goat penis) that my brother has consumed that would never pass by my lips, I knew that Jonathan hadn’t downed a bowl of shark fin soup in 20 years. So three months ago, I did the unthinkable. I asked him if he would be willing to write an op-ed on the shark fin ban bill for the Los Angeles Times."

Mark then goes on to share the panic he felt waiting for his brother's piece, which he thought would never actually get to the Times (no doubt, J. Gold's a little busy flying to Noma and Alinea, among other duties). He says, "As his pissed-off brother, at some level, I really wanted to dislike the piece...Of course, it was brilliant." Not only that, the critic's piece should be highly influential in swaying the vote for AB 376's future in the Senate. How nice to see these two come together for a great cause!